Monday, January 23, 2012

Year X Ahoy!

The trend in North American politics toward what might best be described as Faith-Based Nihilism can be expected to grow ever more potent & sincere as North America's dominance in geopolitics & economics continues to fade away. How far that trend progresses will be a crucial ingredient in determining the history of the 21st Century. It has provided diverse & abundant dividends for a very long time, yet is now visibly mutating into a deadly threat on a scale unknown to humanity since at least the last Ice Age.

The decisive conflict of our times that is already starting to crystallize is not Rich vs. Poor or Democracy vs. Dictatorship or Right vs. Left - it is Reality vs. Bullshit. The former are in fact the logically obvious byproducts of this timeless conflict. So visceral that it even creates its own battlefields within each individual, so critical that it can now quickly drive us into total extinction ... & so ubiquitous that it seems merely to be another droning mundane overtone of our Zeitgeist, not its prime conductor.

Does this thesis contradict my prior emphasis on mental hygiene? Some might argue so ... I would then ask them to show me how or where.

Our darkest shame in all of this is that, like Dracula, stupidity comes into its own only after its agents have given it leave to enter. One does not simply walk into Stupidtown - one first must both choose to burn down the reality that barricades the road to it & act on that choice, & what that does to one's psyche is dire in the extreme. Indulgence in folly can be cathartic, but making folly your god is rarely anything but morbid. No great intellect is needed to discover who is rallying under which standard (by their net output shall ye know them) ... & our collective tragicomedy is that by our very nature we abhor the idea of abandoning either one of these ancient & dearly beloved icons, at any price.